A Programmer with Friends

If you’re developing a game, have you ever tried to stop and start a sound effect repeatedly in quick succession using SoundEffectInstance? If so you probably tried something like:

mySoundEffectInstance.Stop();
mySoundEffectInstance.Play();

And when you did, you noticed something wasn’t right. The sound would either just stop, or just start, not both. You probably searched the web, found some round about ways if fixing it. Well here is what I believe to be the best, no-extra-classes, no-extreme-overhead way of fixing it. Within each class that you want to play one sound effect at a time, but those sound effects may play quite rapidly, use this method:

private void playSFX(SoundEffect sfx)
 {
      mySoundEffectInstance.Stop();
      mySoundEffectInstance = sfx.CreateInstance();
      mySoundEffectInstance.Play();
 }

The one thing you need to make sure of is that the “mySoundEffectInstance” variable is assigned to an instance of a SoundEffect (which could be one of the many in your class) in the constructor, so a nullPointer isn’t thrown. For a look at an example class:

class PlayerMain
    {
        SoundEffect sfx0, sfx1, sfx2, sfx3;
        SoundEffectInstance mySoundEffectInstance;

        public PlayerMain(ContentManager c)
        {   
            sfx0 = c.Load("../../Sounds/SFX/sfx0");
            sfx1 = c.Load("../../Sounds/SFX/sfx1");
            sfx2 = c.Load("../../Sounds/SFX/sfx2");
            sfx3 = c.Load("../../Sounds/SFX/sfx3");

            mySoundEffectInstance = sfx0.CreateInstance();
        }

        public void move(int x)
        {
            switch(x)
            {
                case 0:
                    playSFX(sfx0);
                    break;
                case 1:
                    playSFX(sfx1);
                    break;
                case 2:
                    playSFX(sfx2);
                    break;
                case 3:
                    playSFX(sfx3);
                    break;
            }

        }

        private void playSFX(SoundEffect sfx)
        {
            mySoundEffectInstance.Stop();
            mySoundEffectInstance = sfx.CreateInstance();
            mySoundEffectInstance.Play();
        }

    }

A not very functional class, but one that demonstrates the ability behind playSFX, and how it can fix any problems you may have had.